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Has anyone had any experence with the SMR-breeder queen from Glenn Apiaries? DO NOT buy one!!!!!! AFTER you spend $70.00 for this USDA queen you are told that only 20% live to be ONE year old!!!!!! Mine lived for 5 WEEKS!!!!!
Kevin

Wow! What is the reason for that? Do you think that they are placed under so much stress with the instrumental insemination and whatever else they do to them?

I came very close to getting one this spring, but re-considered after I saw some spectacular queens in my own yard. I have been raising them for three years now. I have several beekeeper friends (commercial/sideliners) and I am always looking for new stock from them.

I live in Central lower Michigan and so far, this has been a great year for the queens. The last two weeks have been tough on my mating nucs...they're honey bound! I've had to split several of the nucs due to over population also. I guess if I'm going to have problems these are the kind to have.

Mites, chalk brood and foulbrood have been extremely rare this year...let's hope it stays that way.

Would you be interested in exchanging one or two good queens for the same from my apiary?

I know a guy in north GA that sales smr queens, for $10.00 each. He has been chemical free for 3 years now. All of his queens are kept in a starter box for about a month to make sure they are good laying queens. I'll ask him if it's OK to put his info on the net.

The reason for the high supercedure rate is the amount of inbreeding required to fix the trait in the queen,plus AI queens are known for this.By babying the breeder hive,and regularly cutting cells,you could raise thousands of daughter queens before losing her.Just remember ,these are breeder queens being used to introduce a certain set of genes into your own stock,and are NOT production queens.

This breeder queen started out laying 100+ eggs per day and went down from there. The other problem was that the grafts were rejected by the queen-right cell builder (during a nectar flow). Twice I put in 34 grafts and each time all were removed right away. I was only out to make 100 queens. If I had known she would only live 5 weeks I would have been more aggressive. I did set up a queen-less cell builder with extra nurse bees for the next grafts, thats when I found she was gone. And I did cut queen cells-not knowing I should have kept them.
Kevin

a hundred eggs is pretty lousy,I agree.Ive bought 4 so far,and lost 2 immediately,but was able to raise queens out of the others.I guess its just a crap shoot,but thats no consolation when you didnt get anything.Ive wondered if Tom Glenn would make good on the poor queens or just shrug it off.I dont know ,because I was aware of the problems and was able to get queens raised so didnt ask.
As for queenright starters, I never had much luck unless they were already building supercedure cells.They are ok for finishers.My favorite cell builder is the queenless starter finisher(free flying)using NO brood,but made up from nurse bees shook from open brood .These will make nice big cells if you get the nutrition right.And when you are done just let them keep a cell,and you have another colony.Simple.(well maybe not quite)but you get the drift.
---Mike